PORTFOLIO

Unless otherwise noted, my involvement in these projects was as the Instructional Designer and Developer. All graphic design showcased on this website is my own.

Featured Samples

Product Training for New Hires

Learners create a "cheat sheet" matrix of all product features at the end of this module.

The aim of this project was to train new hires on the essential features of three Apple products. Since some learners would already be familiar with the products, the learning experience was designed to be 100% interactive and quick for them to complete, while still enabling those with little knowledge to get up to speed. 

Performance Improvement Software Training for Clean User Data

The learner's answer to "Are you new here?" puts them on the correct path through the learning experience. Their name is used periodically to personalize the experience.

Instructor-led training on this topic had been falling short of meeting its objectives, even after multiple iterations. Learners were struggling with complex policies and a tricky technical procedure. By adding this eLearning to the mix, I successfully ensured knowledge transfer while reducing total seat time (from 3.5 hours to 1.5 hours). The same eLearning module was used for both new hires and seasoned learners by providing an introductory chapter only to the new hires.

Building Skills for Sales Growth

In this activity, learners select the two colors in the boxes that make up the color in the heart.

Practice makes perfect. For any learning outcome where a lot of practice is needed, gamification is a great solution. For this project, learners needed to practice mixing colors. 

Strategic Initiatives for Reduced Risk, Errors, and Ramp Up Time

This slide is from a presentation to leadership. (Proprietary content has been changed.)

Serving in a leadership capacity, I performed a needs analysis, created a strategic roadmap, and led two strategic initiatives for a 200-person organization within a major tech company. The first initiative reduced risk (through knowledge management) and laid the foundation for the second initiative, when I established a new central training team and trained 40 decentralized trainers.

Curriculum Design: Managing Collaborative Teams

A diverse set of characters appear in this curriculum's scenarios and examples.

This comprehensive curriculum trains leaders to coach for collaborative behaviors (while modeling it themselves), provides ways to improve collaborative processes, and details best practices for leveraging the true power of collaboration tools.

This is a passion project; it was not commissioned by a particular client. You can contact me to start a conversation about how we can implement this program at your organization.

More Samples

Sales Skills and Product Training for Sales Growth

Given a customer's answers to probing questions, learners are asked what they should say and what they should do. After responding with their answers and receiving feedback, the answers appear on the screen. Slides like this can be easily referred to later.

With a large, geographically dispersed audience, a brand new topic category, and a need to roll out training on a condensed timeline, a webinar was the ideal solution for this project. 

Webinars can be a great way to gather data about how learners contend with a new topic area before going to the expense of developing complex eLearning. In this instance, exciting guest speakers delivered interactive presentations on their brands and products, which were followed by trainer-hosted interactive scenarios that reinforced the company’s selling model. 

Developing this webinar was a highly collaborative effort with multiple SMEs and external speakers, a trainer, a video producer, a copy editor, and a graphic designer.  I designed and wrote the webinar and provided quality assurance. (Note: All graphic design on this website is my own.)

Software Training for Clean Internal Data and Team Communications

In an otherwise technical training, a human touch such as this feedback coach elevates the experience.

Many learners had been winging it in this company’s bug- and task-tracking system. By not following the correct procedure and policies, managers did not have the visibility or clean data they needed to make decisions. 

Since learners already had a baseline knowledge of the system, I used carefully crafted but simple scenarios in a basic simulated environment (for context). In order to proceed through the eLearning, they needed to click on the correct next action. Feedback was the primary mechanism for delivering and reinforcing policy information, out of respect for learners who could demonstrate they knew the correct steps.

Analytical Skills Training on a Shoestring Budget

The cover slide for this project, (along with many other graphic design treatments shown in this portfolio), has been re-imagined to protect intellectual property and client identity.

I needed to create a lot of content on a limited budget for this audience. My learners came to expect a monthly training on current risks and the corresponding signals to look for within a complex UI showing large amounts of data. 

These learners were highly motivated to stay on top of these trends. I provided screencast videos followed by scenario-based exercise prompts and answer keys for them to check their own work. 

To help keep their attention during screencast videos longer than 2-3 minutes, I changed the pitch of the voice-over recording to achieve the effect of having a co-host. It was always fun to tell a learner both voices were me — they would be so surprised! 

Scalable Conceptual and Software Training for a Global Audience

This was a course on encoding road information into a map dataset.

For this course, a large volume of instructor-led content needed to be rapidly converted to scalable training for a global audience. 

Since the content was mostly conceptual, each module began with detailed exposition that I brought to life with animated diagrams and images with animated overlays. Voice-over described what was being shown, and for non-native English speakers, there were captions. Each module concluded with the technical procedure.

Learner analysis, along with good chunking and sequencing of content, were key to the success of this course. Many of the concepts were completely new for many learners, who were unlikely to reside in the countries they would be encoding, and who didn’t even drive in their own country. 

Performance Improvement Policy Training for Clean User Data

In this workflow, data operators updated business records. Information provided by business owners was considered more trustworthy than that provided by general public.

Learners had been making a lot of mistakes because this workflow was very similar to another workflow, but the two had different policies. (See image caption for details.)  

To help set the stage for knowledge transfer, I replicated the essential elements of the software UI; to keep costs down, this was not a full simulation. Learners would see a record with the same look and feel as they were used to, providing context triggers once back on the job.

In order to launch this training in the client’s LMS, I first created a prototype template and ensured that it would work. Once the project was finished, a valuable new template was made available to all instructional designers on the team.

Analytical Skills Training for Improved User Experience

End user satisfaction is the ultimate goal of many of the samples in my portfolio.

A small team was using a lengthy policy document and one-on-one coaching to train their new hires. It was time-intensive for supervisors to train, and the ramp up time was unsatisfactory.

In order to ensure a positive ROI on a project with such a small audience, I recommended keeping the policy manual. It was very well written, with many good examples. I designed and developed an eLearning course that mostly consisted of scenario-based multiple choice questions, matching questions, and other basic question types built-in to a rapid authoring tool (Captivate). Learners would need to reference the manual in order to answer the questions. 

For several of the trickier concepts, I created custom scaffolded questions with detailed feedback. These were selected strategically to keep costs and development time down. I also re-chunked and re-sequenced the content to make it more digestible.

The ramp up time on this workflow went from three days down to two as a result of adding the eLearning. A big part of that was because learners were able to build their confidence more quickly. Also, the data from each module helped supervisors target coaching on areas where the learner needed it most. They could now spend less time training, with better results.